From: gtoal@tardis.computer-science.edinburgh.ac.uk
To: grunwald
Cc: gtoal@tardis.computer-science.edinburgh.ac.uk
Subject: A bit of history for you!
Date: Sat Jun 2 23:05:54 GMT 1990
I don't know who ftp'd the cmr/ps files for you, but give them my thanks!
- I'm the person who generated them. I put them in the uk Aston tex archive
and announced them on uktex & texhax, hoping that someone in the states
would copy them to the clarkson? labrea? archive. I was just starting to
think no-one was using them :)
Anyway, I'm writing because I'm fairly sure the readme file I wrote never
made it into the archive, so here's the info that should have gone with it.
The program to convert the fonts from bitmaps to outlines was written by
Neil Raine at Acorn Computers in the UK. I hacked the TeX end of it;
reading gf files etc, and generating 3000dpi versions of the fonts to get
better rendition.
The fonts are *experimental* - feel free to try them out to see what sort
of quality you can get. Our results were that on low-res lasers (300dpi etc)
the cut of the font was rather heavy - they look like the typical adobe
fonts - not thin & light like the cmr we know & love. On high-res devices
(anything from 1200 up to 2000dpi) They look just like pixel-versions of
cmr. Unfortunately many of the PS phototypesetters give up the ghost at
trying to cache as many outline fonts as an average document needs, whereas
they worked alright with bitmapped fonts.
There is a tiny bug in the bitmap to outline conversion which you should
watch for; occasion characters (maybe 1 in 500 or more) have a spurious
little horizontal line sticking out of them. Since the font generation
took a weekend of 50 high-powered risc machines to run, I'm reluctant to
redo all these when the bug is fixed, so if anyone can report the font
and char position of any of these bugs, I'd be most greatful.
(Oh - I forgot to explain in the previous para; the reason that the 300dpi
fonts are heavy is, i think, because postscript renders a single extra
level of pixels round outlines. At 300dpi this is noticable; at 2000 not)
I hope you enjoy these fonts. If anyone is reading this and is thinking
'oh no, not again - don't they know that PS fonts don't scale properly',
you'll find when you avtually look at them that I've included all the
different design sizes (9, 10, 12pt etc.) - the outlines are only to be
magnified to get the effect of TeX's magsteps, not its point sizes.
Share & Enjoy,
Graham Toal